two
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
Managing Homelessness
in the United States
fter a thirty- year period when the only street
people were a few chronic alcoholics, homelessness reemerged during the economic slump of the late 1970s. Initially concealed by more flamboyant intentional dropouts of the
counterculture, the new homelessness did not attract immediate
public attention. By the early 1980s, large numbers of ragged people
had moved into the downtown areas of large cities, sleeping in doorways and asking for change. An old social problem was reborn, and in
time, also reborn, albeit in new forms, were powerful discourses on
vagrancy developed over previous centuries.
This chapter lays the conceptual groundwork for the ethnography
to come. Moving through some of the most important developments in
American homelessness policy since the colonial period, it shows how
broad, long-standing epistemic currents have fed into three primary
discourses on homelessness: an ancient sin discourse gradually challenged, but by no means defeated, by notions of sickness and system.
The history of American homelessness management has in several
respects run parallel to the country’s broader stream of ideas and
practices around poverty management. But at certain times in history, homelessness has become a more autonomous field of play. In an
effort to keep this rather complex story clear, I differentiate between
specific discourses on homelessness— sin-talk, sick-talk, and systemtalk, in my terms—and the more far-reaching constructions of poverty
A
27
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
to which each is related: moral, therapeutic, and systemic.1 Each discourse on homelessness shares with its related construction of poverty the same fundamental strategies for managing the disruly poor.
The moral construction and sin-talk are primarily tied into strategies
of exclusion and punishment (although there is also the possibility of
redemption for the more deserving); the therapeutic construction and
sick-talk look to treatment; and the systemic construction and systemtalk urge social regulation or even transformation.
Sin, Sickness, and the System
According to the moral construction of poverty, the miseries of the
poor are the result of moral laxity. At best they give into laziness and
hedonism; at worst they sell their souls to the devil. But whether
demonic or merely disorderly, they willfully deviate from society’s rules.
The essential elements of this discourse have remained markedly
consistent between European and North American Protestants over
the last five hundred years. The fundamental causes of poverty are
found in the same character defects, and the primary strategies of control remain punishment and exclusion, although the earlier differentiation between the two has been progressively blurred with the rise
of incarceration, a practice combining both strategies. Ideas about the
instrument of punishment, though, have evolved more significantly.
As the Protestant ethic became entwined with liberalism and social
Darwinism, the drama of future hellfire gradually took second place
to more mundane misery here on earth. God’s judgment passed into
the inexorable hand of the market, rewarding effort and dooming the
feckless.
In comparison with most of Europe and Latin America, the moral
construction of poverty in the United States has been extraordinarily
potent and persistent. Many authors have argued that the persistent
power of this premodern, crudely binary form of social control is
rooted in the nation’s history of settler colonialism. A capitalist powerhouse built on the frontiers of the preindustrial world, the United
States was born of an uneasy marriage between two very different
kinds of society. We tend to accentuate the modernity of America, the
dynamism of its industrialization and the civilized political forms that
28
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
Constructions of poverty
Moral
Disease
Systemic
Discourses on homelessness
Sin-talk
Sick-talk
System-talk
Central cause of
poverty/homelessness
Sin
Sickness
Characteristics of
the social structure
Fundamental strategies
for managing poverty/
homelessness
Punishment
and exclusion
Treatment
Social change/
social regulation
Focus of causal narrative
Individual
Individual
Structural
Notion of agency
Strong
Weak
Weak
Euro-American constructions of poverty and homelessness.
nourished it. Yet equally important was the primary accumulation pioneered by the American colonists and their descendants: the native
genocide, the forceful expropriation of vast amounts of land, and a
prolonged reliance on slave labor and other violent forms of racial
domination.2
It is to this second trajectory that the United States owes its continued
reliance on punishment, incarceration, and even execution to control
the behavior of the poor. Indeed, many make the case that these punitive practices depend for their legitimacy on demonic representations
of African Americans developed during slavery.3 Equally important,
the widely held (erroneous) conception that feckless African Americans make up the majority of welfare claimants has weakened public
support for antipoverty programs throughout the twentieth century,
an abandonment that only reinforces desperation and criminality.4
Lying within the outstretched arms of this moral construction of
poverty is the more specific moral discourse on homelessness—what I
am calling sin-talk. Sin-talk has its own particular bogeymen: the lawless tramp, the inevitably criminal drifter, the fraudulent panhandler.
Over the last four centuries these images of the undomesticated outsider have been mobilized in twin strategies: clearance of vagrants, or
street people, by the police or private security forces, corralling them
into marginal areas away from the rest of the population; and punishment of vagrancy by confinement, often including forced labor.
29
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
From the “Beggar’s Book” to the Poorhouse
American sin-talk dates back at least as far as the great theological and
ethical changes wrought by the Protestant Reformation. The significance of these Protestant innovations is hard to grasp in our own time.
Before the Reformation, medieval European understandings of abject poverty were underpinned by a discourse now almost obsolete
within Protestant countries: the Catholic transcendental discourse
on poverty. The medieval Catholic believed that to refuse charity to
the homeless beggar was to risk eternal damnation. Almsgiving was
the principal practice associated with this discourse. Not every rich
man was willing to give up his worldly goods, and almsgiving was a
much less demanding alternative. The transcendental discourse did
not construct poverty as a social problem. One could sympathize with
wretched individuals, but the persistence of wretchedness was taken
for granted. “The poor are always with us,” says the Bible, and the
possibility of achieving a blessed afterlife through almsgiving actually
made the poor quite useful.
Although gift giving had the important effect of dampening potential conflict between rich and poor, ad hoc donations on the individual level were never enough to deal with large-scale crises. From the
eleventh century onward, population growth and mobility created a
series of epidemics across Europe, devastating newly urbanized peasants who lacked immunity to the common diseases.5 Influential abbots
exhorted their fellows in other monasteries and convents to provide
help and shelter to the sick and poor, calling on the biblical story of
Dives and Lazarus.6 Eventually, rural and urban monasteries provided
rudimentary shelters, known as hospices, which offered a degree of
food and refuge for the indigent and sick. These rather chaotic Catholic hospitals all differed from subsequent European institutions for
the poor in that they made little distinction between deserving and
undeserving or, indeed, between poverty and physical incapacity.7
The Protestant Reformation initiated a sea change in how poor
people were seen and treated. Work, not almsgiving, was now the road
to salvation, and poor people who failed to work represented a disconcerting blot on the spiritual landscape. Protestant crusaders strove to
discredit the transcendental discourse by associating it with the most
corrupt aspects of the Catholic establishment.
30
managing h omele s s n e s s
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
The case against spontaneous almsgiving was made most forcefully
by Martin Luther in his Liber Vagatorum, or “beggar’s book.” This
apocryphal rant is written in the form of an encyclopedia of deceptions perpetuated by beggars. Presenting the beggar as the ally and lay
counterpart of the fraudulent, licentious priests and monks he excoriated in other works, Luther aimed to cast suspicion on impoverished
strangers of all kinds, whether peddler, blind beggar, epileptic, cripple,
or wandering scholar.8 The solution to the contemporary problem of
beggars was strict monitoring of paupers by each parish and limiting
aid to the deserving:
Every town and village should know their own paupers, as written down
in the Register, and assist them. But as to outlandish and strange beggars they are not to be borne with, unless they have proper letters and
certificates; for all the great rogueries mentioned in this book are done
by these. If each town would only keep an eye upon their paupers, such
knaveries would soon be at an end.9
With Luther’s help, the new sin-talk transformed attitudes toward
beggars. For the first time, begging and impoverished wandering were
primarily understood as indications of moral weakness or criminality and as major social problems. The new Protestant municipalities
of Switzerland and Germany, for example, quickly outlawed begging
and removed responsibility for welfare from the Catholic Church into
rationalized secular organizations. Sixteenth-century welfare reforms
were most far-reaching in Protestant-controlled areas. By the mid1500s, for example, English vagabonds were liable to be branded and
enslaved, the punishment for a second escape being death. Catholic
elites followed suit, adopting the new antibegging laws to control the
famine-starved peasants on their own lands.
In Reformation Britain, the new Protestant animosity toward beggars and wanderers came together with the needs of the aristocrats,
launching a ruthless war on vagrancy. The centuries-long exodus of
serfs from rural estates to the growing towns was accelerating, squeezing the resources of the aristocracy and providing the cheap labor to
fuel the rise of the rival merchant class. In response, the lords instituted even stricter vagrancy laws. The justification for these extraordinary punishments was the same belief expressed by Luther in the
31
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
Liber Vagatorum: the notion that impoverished wanderers lay at the
root of social disorder and criminality.
The moral construction of poverty thoroughly dominated American poverty management throughout the colonial period and beyond.
The colonists of the seventeenth century reiterated the approaches
to poor relief unfolding in Britain, combining limited relief for certified residents with stringent settlement laws denying entitlement to
strangers.10 Indeed, the sectarian insularity of the New England Puritans only intensified suspicion of newcomers without money, who
were liable to be warned out of town or auctioned to local farmers as
indentured workers.11
Over the next two centuries, poverty relief remained an intensely
local affair. Colonial small towns spent a good deal of effort on shipping
out both disabled and able-bodied vagrants to other municipalities.12 For
the poor who did qualify for relief, there were three possible outcomes.
Those judged to be sufficiently deserving—mostly women—were given
“outdoor relief,” that is, aid that did not require them to be institutionalized indoors. The second option was the dreaded poorhouse, where
vagrants and other indigent paupers were involuntarily confined and
set to work. The third practice, and probably most abusive of all, was
to auction off the poor to the lowest bidder, who would keep his or her
charges as cheaply as possible, with little oversight from the parish.
Treatment of the nonslave poor was worse in the South, where organized outdoor relief was very rare.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, urbanization
increased the numbers of people living in abject poverty, concentrating them in larger towns and cities. To deal with this new industrial poor, both more visible and rebellious, urban elites developed
a sprawling patchwork of institutions: prisons, houses of industry,
orphanages, asylums, poor farms, and jails. The central institution
of this complex was the poorhouse, designed to warehouse all kinds
of municipal paupers.
The expansion of the poorhouse system was broadly supported
by the upper classes of the early nineteenth century. Many educated
people were influenced by the work of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, who saw the roots of poverty in insufficient
discipline, illegitimacy, and the pernicious effects of relief on the labor
32
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
market.13 With the poorhouse, as with the new penitentiary, elites
pursued social control over both vagrancy and demands for welfare.
They hoped that a centralized institution of confinement and hard
labor would deter tramping and applications for municipal relief.14
However gruesome the reality, the poorhouse was by no means
a purely punitive development. The early nineteenth century was a
period of great optimism, with hope that rational social engineering
might solve all sorts of problems. The more sympathetic reformers
were particularly concerned to finish with two of the infamous abuses
common under the existing, more piecemeal system: the auctioning
off of care of the poor to the lowest bidder and the endless transportations of paupers from one town to the next by municipalities unwilling
to pay for their survival. On humanistic grounds alone, the imprisonment of the improvident in poorhouses was seen to open the greater
possibility of treatment and rehabilitation. The future therapeutic discourse on homelessness—sick-talk—was already in the air.
In practice, however, the new institutions continued to be dominated by notions of sin rather than sickness, with the goal of deterrence
triumphing over the ideal of rehabilitation. The poorhouses were
underfunded, disease-ridden barns with terrible food and little heating. Any pauper capable of work was set to hard labor in farming or
manufacturing by superintendents keen to maximize their profits.15
Vagrants or drunkards shared quarters with destitute families, the
mentally ill, abandoned children, the old and the sick, and the mentally and physically disabled.
The mid-nineteenth-century poorhouse may not have given much
space to the developing therapeutic construction of poverty, but
ultimately its failings made it a unifying focus for critics of punitive
approaches. By midcentury, many reformers were arguing that the
age-old division between the deserving and undeserving poor should
be reconceptualized on medical grounds and the poorhouse population separated into multiple regimes. Children should be removed to
orphanages and given a useful education, while the genuinely disabled, sick, insane, and elderly should be given decent medical care
in almshouses and asylums. The physically fit, in contrast, would be
more convincingly deterred from dependency if separated off to perform hard labor in houses of industry and poor farms.
33
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
As has often been the way with American poverty policy, poor funding trumped theoretical ideals. Asylums, funded at state levels, did
indeed take over many of the mentally ill and elderly, but county houses
could ill afford separate institutions for the other inmates. Instead, the
poorhouses gave up on the project of disciplining vagrants. Between
1850 and 1870 they turned into infirmaries, ejecting all transients of
working age.16 Men and women on the streets now had nowhere to
sleep but the station houses and jails.17
Even inside the highly controlled tutelage of the late nineteenth century’s confining institutions, the medicalization of poverty remained
patchy. Certainly, the classification and management of the poor began
to take on a more medicalized character, but the therapeutic construction of poverty remained incoherent, with the concept of rehabilitation constantly undermined by the persistence of moral condemnation and punishment.
Outside of the confining institutions, sin-talk proved even more
dominant. The migrant poor continued to be plagued by settlement
laws that refused relief to outsiders without established residency and
punished them for their indigence.18 These laws had by now served as
the benchmark of the Anglo-American distinction between deserving
and undeserving poor for nearly three centuries. Each locality was
free to set its own classification system and rules, creating a chaotic
system that only encouraged the lengthening of settlement requirements as more generous locales tried to prevent immigration from
those with stricter laws.19 Even arguments from frustrated employers
failed to shift the intensely local structure of welfare provision, and
settlement laws remained the primary mechanism for adjudicating
relief well into the twentieth century.20
Tramp Scares
Settlement laws utterly failed as a deterrent strategy, and the numbers of migrant poor swelled throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, most manual workers had been reduced
to wage labor, vulnerable to the unsteady business cycle. Independent
journeymen artisans were slowly but inexorably losing their jobs to
lower paid apprentices and unskilled laborers, and unskilled and seasonal laborers like threshers or ice cutters losing theirs to machines.21
34
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h ome le s s n e s s
The Civil War further disrupted employment and production, as well
as leaving hordes of hardened ex-soldiers who refused to return to
domesticated settled life under the old conditions. New immigrants
from Europe and many thousands of freed slaves moved into the north
and west of the country, increasing competition for both agricultural
and industrial jobs. Both single people and families migrated frequently, struggling for a niche in crowded labor markets.22
Decades of immiseration and dispossession culminated in the
great crash of 1873, the worst unemployment crisis in American history. Many parents pulled their children from school and sent them
to work in mines, textile mills, and glassworks, where vacancies for
children under the age of fourteen were more plentiful than those
for adults. Other families made sweatshops of their homes, with all
but the smallest children participating in making artificial flowers,
clothes, or other piecework.23 Yet even these tactics were often not
enough to keep families afloat. Thousands wandered the countryside
looking for work, and others gathered in the dense slums of the major
cities, insistently demanding relief, the more submissive manner of
the traditional small town charity recipient now replaced by assertiveness and hostility.
Their authority and legitimacy challenged, the ruling classes turned
their attention to managing the disruly poor. Following the energetic
leadership of Josephine Lowell, prominent ministers, professors, doctors, and industrialists developed Charity Organization Societies across
the North. Their primary target was the indiscriminate giving of alms
and outdoor relief; they believed that overgenerous handouts to alcoholics and immigrants who lacked the Protestant work ethic weakened the spirit of the American worker, creating dense neighborhoods
of dependency and vice in the great cities.24
The new charity activists, like Martin Luther 350 years earlier, were
nostalgic for a radiant past when rich and poor had interacted more
intimately, with less overt conflict. They aimed to abolish dole giving
and replace it with a carefully engineered gift relationship between
upper and lower classes, where “good men and gracious women
[would] inspire goodness and graciousness in other men and women.”25
This articulation of the benefits of charity demonstrates the distance
between the Charity Organization Societies and the old Catholic transcendental discourse. Though intimate contact with the poor was still
35
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
connected to spiritual salvation, the idea that the poor were closer to
God was long gone. To the contrary, it was the “gracious” of the better
classes who were to bring spiritual light to the benighted rabble.
The Charity Organization Societies combined nostalgia for noblesse
oblige with modern record keeping and communications. They gave
no direct relief themselves but made sure it was impossible for poor
people to move between one benevolent society and another. Relief,
according to the Charity Organization Societies’ principles of “scientific charity,” should be given only after a charity visitor had visited
the household in question to probe into their attitudes and practices.26
Charity visitors examined women as housekeepers and mothers, while
their husbands had to undergo a stringent labor test. (This nineteenthcentury “workfare” usually consisted of breaking stones or chopping
wood.) Families of men who drank should not be helped unless they
separated themselves completely from the man in question.27
The Charity Organization Societies’ distrust of the male poor drew
strength from the current popularity of social Darwinism, a philosophy that equated the labor market with the law of the jungle. The
fit—that is, the hardworking and sober—prospered because of their
moral and physical superiority, whereas poverty represented failure
before both God and nature. With this hyperindividualist doctrine
riding high, the semiotic division of American life into feminine and
masculine spheres became more caricatured, with sympathy and pity
only for the most passive and pure representations of women and
children.
Charity reformers used pulpits and newspapers to paint single
men asking for money as criminals and to warn would-be benefactors against thoughtlessly indiscriminate almsgiving. Yale’s Francis
Wayland, president of the American Social Science Association, was
inspired enough to put his ideas in verse form:
He tells you of his starving wife,
His children to be fed,
Poor little, lovely innocents,
All clamorous for bread—
And you so kindly help to put
A bachelor to bed.28
36
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
Wayland’s doggerel shows just how synonymous were bachelorhood and unworthiness in those years, for his punch line would be
meaningless without a shared assumption that helping to “put a bachelor to bed” was an outrageous waste of money. Men who should be
rightfully striving for survival in the economic jungle had no legitimate claim to the comforts of domesticity in their own right.
The idealistic reformers of the Charity Organization Societies on
their own could not have brought about the sweeping charity reforms
of the late 1870s. Fortunately, their interests coincided with those of
Republican politicians eager to destroy the working-class Democratic
machines and their ward-level patronage base. Together, these two
groups were able to act swiftly and decisively. By the late 1870s, provision of municipal outdoor relief had dwindled sharply, and numerous
municipalities had divested all responsibility for relief into the hands
of private religious organizations.
Michael Katz suggests that the reforms of the 1870s and 1880s
highlight a perennial contradiction within U.S. poverty management.
Concerned with fraud and cultural degeneracy, Charity Organization
Societies replaced the relatively neutral financial support offered by
ward-level outdoor relief with intimate investigations that invaded the
homes and lives of the poor, demanding demonstrations of gratitude
and convincing dramas of failure and tragedy. But by making people
compete to present the most deserving, helpless case, these practices
were likely to create habits of feigned deference, manipulation, and
passive dependency, not the honest self-sufficiency that the societies
theoretically desired. By adopting a set of discourses and practices
that treated poor people as manipulative and dependent, they were
likely to create their own reality.29
The stigma and powerlessness weighing on unemployed men after
the abolition of outdoor relief led many to leave home and join the
outlaw army of tramps.30 Mobility was easier than ever before. The
railroads that now crisscrossed the country made it possible for penniless migrants to cross vast distances, riding illegally in empty boxcars
or hanging underneath the wagons. The unrestrained vagrant, always
a cause of distrust and fear, could now cross the continent, stopping
at any small town with a railroad station. Not surprisingly, the appearance of these ragged strangers eating and sleeping in the streets and
37
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
roadsides ruffled the social order, and local elites fought back with an
intensified crackdown on transients.
Vagrancy laws were both revived and newly invented across the
country. Any form of begging could be considered evidence that a
man was a tramp, and many state legislatures prohibited migration
without “visible means of support” under penalty of imprisonment
and forced labor.31
These legal developments were mirrored on the municipal level,
where men suspected of vagrancy were arrested without warrants,
tried without juries, and sentenced to up to three years’ hard labor.32
New York City and Chicago, as hubs of the migrant worker circuit,
were particularly energetic in their attacks on the tramp population,
with police in each city arresting several thousand on vagrancy charges
every year in the late 1870s and 1880s. In New York City, police officers
routinely roughed up unemployed men standing or sitting around in
the street. Any loitering man without decent clothes was liable to be
assaulted as a tramp, even, in some cases, sitting on his own stoop.33
Reformers in several cities even succeeded in closing down the sleeping place of last resort, the police station itself, arguing that there was
insufficient regulation and supervision.34
In their struggle to subdue the tramp population, the northern elites
followed a road laid by landowners of the postwar South. Following
emancipation, large groups of freed slaves fled their places of captivity. Some took the long roads north and west out of former slave states,
while more took to moving frequently within the South to avoid the
miserable debt peonage now imposed on them by the planter class.35
Desperate to hold on to their cheap labor force, the cotton aristocracy cooked up a mixture of trickery, violence, and a plethora of
legal bindings to control the penniless, and mostly illiterate, freedmen and women. Along with emigrant agent restrictions and enticement laws came harsh vagrancy statutes and tightly controlled relief
administration.36
These southern strategies of racial control were swiftly adopted by
northern charity reformers in their project of restraining the increasingly unruly northern working classes. Several of the most prominent
charity reformers, including Josephine Shaw Lowell, Samuel Gridley
Howe, and Edward Pierce, traveled south in the late 1860s and 1870s
to observe or participate in the early efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau
38
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h ome le s s n e s s
and Freedmen’s Association before applying similar terminology and
tactics to the native-born white and immigrant working classes in
New York, Boston, and Chicago.37 This translation of social control
from South to North provides a compelling example of how both sintalk and the American moral construction of poverty in general have
been periodically reinforced and hardened by the harsh binaries and
forceful techniques of racial domination.
The great tramp scare also spurred the development of therapeutic
and systemic discourses on homelessness. Various theories emerged that
defined even homelessness itself as a pathology. Following the prewar
diagnosis of “dromomania” among runaway slaves, psychopathologists
now discovered wanderlust and “fugue” among the tramps. Ideas attributing homelessness to psychological weakness or immaturity remained
intellectually respectable for the next fifty years. (The founder of the
American eugenics movement, Charles Davenport, went a couple of
steps further, developing a theory of nomadism as an inherited pathological condition linked to racial inferiority.)38
Among poorer Americans, though, the 1870s spurred militant critiques of laissez-faire capitalism. For workers with experience moving backward and forward between wage work and dependence on
alms, neither psychopathology nor sin-talk’s fixed opposition of the
honest worker and the devious beggar was likely to ring true. Workers
and their advocates instead conceptualized a large class of men constantly vulnerable to unemployment, obliged to “either sell day work,
or live on charity, or starve to death,” as labor reformer Ira Steward
put it.39 Even as anti-tramp feeling erupted into violence and hysteria, the common plea of the down-and-out man for work surged into
increasingly militant demands for relief, such as the celebrated march
of Coxey’s Army of unemployed veterans.
Organized labor mounted a spirited resistance to vagrancy laws and
coerced pauper labor, using the labor press and federal committees to
press their case. By imprisoning workers and making them labor for no
pay, argued labor representatives, vagrancy laws threatened the livelihoods of wage workers. They pointed out similarities to the fugitive
slave laws that had outraged northern liberals before the Civil War.
Free men should be allowed to search for work without being thrown
in jail. Unregulated boom-bust capitalism, they argued, was the primary source of vagrancy and many other social problems affecting the
39
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
poor. With a crowded labor market forcing men to settle for wages
barely reaching subsistence level, the declaration of a war on vagrancy
was an insult to hard-hit workers, a mockery of the concept of free
labor.40 What was needed was not punishment but rationalized social
protection.
For the first time in American history, system-talk was embraced
within elite discourse. A minority of elite social reformers became convinced that unemployment itself was indeed a systemic problem beyond
the control of poor people themselves.41 Their ideas would have little
immediate effect, but percolated within the progressive movement,
preparing fertile soil for the New Dealers of the next generation.
But among working-class people themselves, system-talk continued
to gain strength. Despite the high levels of repression, the union movement increased in confidence and scope. The far left of the movement
gradually coalesced and rejected the compromises of the American
Federation of Labor, founding the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) in 1905. For the first time, the transient moved to center stage:
the IWW developed a radical analysis of homelessness, eloquently
blaming the greed of the employing class for the destitution of the
hobo army. Hobos themselves, not the state, were not only the object,
but also the revolutionary subject of “Wobbly” discourse and strategy.
Unlike other unions, the IWW organized heavily among the hobos,
recruiting thousands of them into their “One Big Union” every year
between 1905 and the First World War.
The IWW produced weekly journals in many cities. In Chicago, the
vital center of the railroad network and therefore the hobo world, the
union put out separate papers in nine languages. Nels Anderson related
(in a rather irritated tone) that newcomers to even remote “jungles”
(hobo encampments) were liable to be asked to show the organization’s red membership card.42 Though the anticommunist purges of the
late teens and early 1920s destroyed the IWW as a mass movement,
its spirit continued to flourish among the hobos and other marginal
Americans.
The Rise and Demise of the New Deal Era
The mass unemployment following the Wall Street crash precipitated
a major battle between the moral and systemic constructions of pov40
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h ome le s s n e s s
erty. As in the great tramp scare, homelessness became a crucial field
of discursive dispute. Again, huge numbers of people traveling and living rough prompted an expansion of authoritarian practices of punishment and exclusion. As mass unemployment multiplied their numbers,
the already unpopular “wild boys of the road” became seen as a major
social threat. In only one month of 1932, the Southern Pacific estimated that it had driven 80,000 transients off its trains.43
Many of the destitute migrants made for the West, drawn by rumors
of jobs in California agribusiness. They were met with extreme hostility. Mobs regularly beat up single men for trying to cross the state
line, while the Okies traveling in families were similarly shunned, portrayed in the press as disease ridden, incestuous, ignorant, and inbred.
Initial charitable attempts were overwhelmed, and many cities provided little support to homeless migrants of any description. The Los
Angeles police department, for example, would regularly sweep skid
row neighborhoods and book every vagrant for thirty days inside.44
As millions of workers lost their jobs, the traditional Protestant view
of unemployment and vagrancy as the products of character flaws
could not sustain its hegemonic position, and Roosevelt and his allies
swept into power, promising large-scale government intervention to
protect the population from the irrationalities of the economic system.
The homeless people who named their tent cities for the laissez-faire
policies of President Herbert Hoover now found elite allies in the corporatist socialists on the left of the Roosevelt administration. There
remained considerable resistance, especially in hard-hit California,
where the big growers and Hollywood came together to crush the
populist Upton Sinclair in the 1934 race for governor. It took outsiders
to the state’s political structure, university professors and New Dealers with federal jobs, to set up the famous federal transient camps that
ultimately improved conditions for some of the migrant families.45
The new order emanating from Washington required new ways of
talking about poverty. The Roosevelt Democrats spoke of the “new
unemployment” and the migrant worker as if they should be distinguished from the disreputable hobo or tramp problem of the previous
decades. Some sought merely to establish yet another benchmark
differentiating between the deserving and undeserving poor. Yet the
more radical New Dealers were determined to establish categories
uncontaminated by moral constructions of homelessness, treating
41
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
both the “unemployed” and the “migrant worker” as inclusive categories. The job-creation programs of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps drew in not only the new
destitute of the 1930s but many of the former disreputable poor.
Tim Cresswell has made the case that the Farm Security Administration photography program, in particular, played a vital role in this
process. The haunting, dignified images produced by Dorothea Lange
and the other FSA photographers reconstructed the rebellious tramp
into the yearning, dispossessed migrant worker, a victim of social disorder who needed to be given the means for a settled, more regulated
existence.46
The programs instituted by the Roosevelt administration and the
massive World War II mobilization put an end to large-scale homelessness for the next forty years. The radicalism of the 1930s may have
been dissipated, first by the war effort and then by McCarthyism, but
the New Deal order of social inclusion via Keynesian economic policy
remained in place, bolstered by the economic growth created by the
Pax Americana during the postwar years, as well as the activism of
African Americans and their allies. The tent cities and migrant labor
camps seemed to be gone for good, and many who previously had
been desperately poor finally obtained a stake in the society. A cluster of systemic interventions — labor rights, job creation programs,
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, the GI Bill, federally mandated cash transfers to poor families, and, above all, Social
Security—created a substantial break with the past. Legions of white
working-class families finally became the steady, prosperous consumers of Henry Ford’s dream.
While not everybody became rich or even prosperous, the New
Deal order greatly reduced the risk of extreme poverty. Even African
Americans, cut out of many of the most important New Deal programs
by racism within the Democratic Party, saw a modest but steady rise in
living conditions over the first two postwar decades. The elderly, until
then always the biggest demographic group of paupers, were rescued
by Social Security from homelessness and destitution on skid row.
Yet the complex, unpredictable dialectic of history was at work, and
the very successes of the New Deal laid the foundations for its death.
Without the big government of mass mortgage subsidies, highway
42
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
creation, legalized trade unionism, and Social Security, many of the
white working-class bootstrappers of the 1950s would have remained
in the cities, more dependent on urban public goods—public schools,
hospitals, libraries, parks—and thus more willing to spend their tax
dollars on them. Instead, in one of the great ironies of the twentieth
century, the New Dealers created the conditions for a suburban exodus of white working-class city dwellers, whose subsequent embrace
of privatized domestic nirvana and the Nixonian politics of resentment came to constitute a great bulwark against further investments
in public goods.
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw the progressive abandonment of
great swathes of white New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago,
as well as scores of smaller American cities. Left behind were African
Americans, cut out of the suburban boom by the inequities of the FHA
and other New Deal programs and by continued labor and housing
discrimination. Even within the cities, the poorest African Americans
were concentrated into the corrals of the great housing projects, the
names of which became bywords for crime and misery.
As the civil rights movement gathered steam in the early 1960s,
Democratic politicians finally attempted to address the exclusion of
African Americans from the New Deal order. The Kennedy and Johnson years saw not only the extraordinarily late enfranchisement of
African Americans, but also the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the
Community Action Program, and companion elements of the Johnson
administration’s War on Poverty.
Through the new Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), the federal
government funded numerous community-based programs focused
on education, juvenile delinquency, job training, and civil rights, improving the living conditions of many people living in poverty. The welfare
rights activism sponsored by many community organizations sharply
increased the number of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Widely available food stamps mitigated outright hunger, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, and
Medicare all were expanded to create better health coverage for welfare recipients, the disabled, and the elderly.
With the escalation of the Vietnam War, the poverty warriors lost
much of their political momentum. Their already limited funding,
43
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
never significant enough, slowed, and the only significant form of job
creation became the draft. The desperation with which younger African Americans viewed their persistently blocked aspirations found
expression in the urban uprisings of the late 1960s, and the destruction only further accelerated the exodus of those with the means to
leave.
As urban manufacturing shuddered to a standstill over the next
decade, the collapse of the urban tax base drove the older central cities
of the nation into a fiscal vortex. Presidents Nixon and Ford refused
to help, sticking to their developing political narrative of an injured
white majority beset by a conspiracy between elite liberals and overdemanding people of color.47 In 1980 Ronald Reagan took power, thoroughly rejecting the Keynesian principle of tax-and-spend and promising to revitalize American business by declaring war on antipoverty
programs and a century of labor rights. During the following years,
the systemic construction of poverty staggered from defeat to defeat,
its political rhetoric discredited and its institutional power inexorably
whittled away by decades of budget cuts and program abolitions. The
New Deal order was over.
The Return of Street Homelessness
During the early 1970s, the social work agencies serving street people
in cities across the United States noticed rising numbers of transient
and penniless clients, substantially different from the more middleclass hippie dropouts many of these agencies were created to serve.
Along with the counterculture’s detritus of LSD casualties and heroin
addicts, the agency workers saw increasing numbers of chronic transients. The Travelers’ Aid Society noted large numbers taking to the
road in search of work, once again heading for California and other
places thought to be richer in jobs. But labor markets were tight across
the nation, and after a short while in “crash housing,” they would
move on again. Many were small-town transients who had little identification with the counterculture.48
The numbers of transients and long-term street homeless continued to rise throughout the 1970s, but the phenomenon was slow to
gain much media attention until the depression of 1982, when unemployment reached 11 percent. The number of people visibly home44
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
less increased sharply, shocking the many Americans who had thought
that sleeping in the street was as obsolete as the horse and carriage.
The ancient social problem of homelessness had reemerged and
with it the debates that had raged during earlier periods. Over the next
decade, journalists and social workers, ministers and doctors, intellectuals and homeless activists, religious advocates and politicians
struggled to control the definition of the problem.
The first discourse to be revived was system-talk. In fact, systemic
constructions of poverty were already in crisis when large-scale
street homelessness reemerged in the late 1970s. Yet in spite of, or
perhaps because of, this crisis, system partisans fought vigorously to
claim the new social problem for their own terrain, to present it as
striking evidence of the dysfunction of contemporary social and economic policy and, in particular, the neoliberal policies of the Reagan
administration.
In this project, system-talk had one great advantage. Although the
meanings of homelessness had in fact been highly contested during
the 1930s, the New Deal order saw old-fashioned sin-talk and sicktalk fall into abeyance. The problem had become defined in retrospect
by the resonant legacy of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Lange’s
Migrant Mother, giving the homeless poor a good chance of being seen
as “deserving.” Outraged by the Reagan administration attacks on the
welfare state and the unions, a group of longtime activists launched
themselves into energetic anti-homelessness campaigns. Perhaps
they could revive the nation’s failing antipoverty impulses by showing them a group whose desperation and sheer deprivation seemed
to be indisputable. They were joined by thousands of left and liberal
religious advocates, ranging from the radical Catholic Worker organization, whose members had already been living with, feeding, and
housing the impoverished for decades, to well-heeled congregations
of various faiths and denominations, horrified by the human misery
confronting them in the streets. This broad coalition took action at all
levels of government, demanding that the homeless should be given
the necessities of life: food, housing, and medical care.
On the local level, most advocates and activists focused on mobilizing sympathy toward immediate service provision and quickly made
significant gains in terms of both municipal funding and volunteer
mobilization. Early movement discourse converged around causal
45
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
links between homelessness and large-scale layoffs, successfully drawing media attention in particular to white workers and their families
swelling the lines at soup kitchens and food banks across the country.
With these kinds of images, they hoped to get away from both the
negative image of the ghetto poor and the idea of homelessness as a
form of countercultural rebellion.
The anti-homelessness movement chose the term “homelessness”
(as opposed to “transient,” “indigent,” etc.) for its implication that the
biggest difference between the homeless and the housed was their lack
of shelter.49 The more politicized of the activists hoped that not only
could they win lifesaving services for the very poor, but that increased
sympathy for the homeless would add to a broad public perception
of the inhumanity of the Reagan revolution. Perhaps they could turn
the public against corporate downsizing, union busting, and welfare
rollback, just as the homeless Hoovervilles had served the reform discourse of the depression era.
Despite early resistance from elected officials, especially in New
York City,50 the anti-homelessness movement was surprisingly successful. Washington, D.C.’s Community for Creative Non-Violence
(CCNV)51 led the way, with their 1981 “Reaganville” of tents, crosses,
and plywood tombstones in front of the White House. Three years
later, the first federal shelter opened in D.C. The activists had succeeded in making the homeless into the new “deserving poor,” now
perceived as more white, passive, and suffering than the unruly ghetto
poor, who were once again being scapegoated by politicians and the
popular press as an antagonistic, pathological underclass.52 Their
insistence on the basic human right to shelter resulted in the opening of thousands of emergency shelters across the country during this
period, ranging from small volunteer-run operations in church basements to vast dormitories in hundreds of National Guard armories
commandeered for the purpose.
The liberal mass media, always on the lookout for pathos, rushed
to present sympathetic images of homeless people in films and television.53 They followed the lead of advocates in presenting homeless
people as regular Americans traumatized by disability or unemployment, especially emphasizing white people54 and homeless two-parent
families (which were, in fact, relatively rare).55 Similarly, advocates
and activists followed the lead of homeless panhandlers in drawing
46
managing h ome le s s n e s s
attention to the prior military service of many homeless men. Hollywood started pumping out tragedies featuring homeless Vietnam veterans.56 In 1986, at what later proved to be the highest point of media
sympathy, six million people joined hands coast to coast and raised
$24 million for the “Hungry and Homeless.”57
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
The Homeless Archipelago
Over the next decade, the radical anti-homelessness activists became
victims of their own success. In the absence of strong government
intervention, the emergency was mainly addressed by religious congregations with an existing tradition of charity work. Soup kitchens
sprang up in countless church basements in one of the great volunteer mobilizations of the century. Every day thousands of high school
students, seniors, and other volunteers prepared and served food to
this new “deserving poor.” While much immediate hardship was mitigated, the soup kitchen or emergency shelter tended, as ever, to institutionalize the problem of homelessness rather than prevent it. The
vague good intentions of this large volunteer body drew more heavily on habitual discourses and practices of religious charity than on
the traditions of protest and self-organization of the radical activists,
whose network was far smaller and more sparsely distributed. Somewhere along the way, the systemic discourse of human rights violated
had become lost in a sea of practices that implied very different ways
of understanding the problem.58
Many of the multiplying shelters and soup kitchens developed the
same moralistic character as the prewar rescue missions, combining
elements of charitable donation and admonition. All over small-town
America, homeless clients were required to pray before eating or sleeping. In small evangelical Protestant operations, fiery deacons jumped
up and down in front of lines of food recipients, exhorting them to
leave the ways of the devil. In Catholic soup kitchens the clients sat
at empty tables, drearily intoning the Lord’s Prayer with the nuns
before receiving their mashed potato and mystery meat. Even in the
more professionalized secular shelters of the larger cities, the frontline workers tended to treat homeless clients with a high degree of
disrespect, reinforcing the stigma of homelessness with a presumption
of guilt.
47
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
If the operations of many of the new homelessness institutions took
on the sin-talk of the long-standing mission tradition, the more liberal
institutions set up intimate connections between charitable volunteer
and grateful recipient, creating ties of deference and obligation across
social classes.59 The liberal food programs and houses of hospitality
run by the most fiery homelessness advocates settled into day-today practices that were fundamentally quietist, emphasizing volunteers’ closeness to and acceptance of the homeless rather than the
prevention of homelessness. Drawing on the pre-Reformation transcendental practice of cleansing one’s spirit by “being with” the poor,
middle-class volunteers found their own liberation from social guilt
in friendly, superficially egalitarian exchanges with the less fortunate.
Their ideas about homelessness may have emphasized “the system,”
but the practice of volunteering tended merely to “accommodate” the
problem, to use Snow and Anderson’s terminology.60 Far from serving
as living critique of a negligent social system, homelessness became the
primary arena for the restoration of the old gift relationship between
the indigent and the privileged that had served to stabilize the dangerous classes before the age of entitlement.61
The rise of small-scale charitable programs, whether of the hellfire
or the quietist variety, did much to undercut the systemic focus of the
advocates, but they lost even more ground to sick-talk and professionalization of homelessness services. Their great struggle to secure significant federal funding resulted in the 1987 McKinney Act, which in
turn stimulated the growth of a massive bureaucratic structure for the
management of homelessness, systematically favoring those with qualifications for social welfare or public administration over the religious
or radical activists who led the earlier, more independent agencies.
Some system-talking activists resisted becoming too involved in the
new archipelago of agencies managing the homeless and retained an
emphasis on rights interventions, from squatting campaigns to tussles
over anti-panhandling codes. But more could not resist the opportunity to draw on funding sources to create programs with a democratic,
system-talking ethos. Once they got into the business of service provision, however, the leaders who had developed the radical systemic
critique were in danger of turning into homelessness managers.
“You can’t end homelessness, you know,” said Paul Boden of the
San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. “You can impact the poverty
48
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
programs and the education programs and the housing programs to the
point that there’s less homeless people. . . . I mean, we—we exist because
the other shit wasn’t working. . . . But you can’t end homelessness until
you’ve knocked down all those barriers. And by setting ourselves up the
way we have, in the way Home Base and the National Coalition and
the National Law Center have—and us—we’ve allowed ourselves to be
become another tier and another player in the fuckin’ arena.”
Boden felt in retrospect that social justice goals were all too easily
displaced by the business of daily social work. Surrounded by an everincreasing army of salaried social workers and (mostly apolitical)
volunteers, he saw the programs for which they had fought so hard
become fixed into a sprawling holding mechanism that many on the
street and off came to call the “homelessness industry.” In the meantime, the defunding of broader-based housing and welfare programs
continued apace, ensuring that the industry was here to stay.
The McKinney Act rapidly transformed the field of U.S. homelessness provision from a small network of voluntarist organizations
focused on social change and emergency aid into a social service behemoth. Informed by the deliberations of welfare policy experts, the
federal funding stream came to determine where and how to spend
billions of dollars dedicated to shelters and transitional housing. The
number of agencies multiplied from 1,500 in the early eighties to more
than 15,000 ten years later, creating thousands of new positions for
case managers and program administrators. An army of social work
professionals trained in the language of disease and dysfunction
designed and moved into the more comprehensive transitional shelters mandated by the Clinton administration’s “Continuum of Care”
plan, examining and categorizing their clients’ capacities in terms
of mental health, substance use, life skills, parenting, budgeting, and
overall “housing-readiness.”62 Volunteers moved to the sidelines, now
concentrated in the more discursively shallow field of food provision.
The growing homelessness archipelago powered the ascendance of
sick-talk within both the academy and the media. A new lingua franca
linked the hundreds of thousands of health-care professionals and
nonprofit workers employed by the developing homeless archipelago,
and researchers working within such programs turned out hundreds
of studies of the pathologies of the homeless, establishing their high
levels of addiction, depression, and family dysfunction. As sick-talk
49
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
expanded into a large subfield across social welfare, psychology, public
health, and other disciplines, researchers developed complex, multifaceted models of the causes of homelessness, and leading voices such
as Alice Baum and Donald Burnes fiercely challenged the claims of
the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and other advocates.63
From the point of view of many health professionals building expertise
within the homelessness archipelago, homelessness was a symptom of
the severe mental illness and substance abuse of the few and had little
to do with working and housing conditions for the many. Some used
the news media to criticize the ideological hyperbole of the activists’
system-talk, arguing that their conception of a large working class
pool at risk from homelessness relied on erroneous claims of similarity between the homeless and the general public.
The struggle between sick-talk and system-talk reached boiling
point over the 1990 U.S. Census. After only a cursory attempt in 1980,
the Census Bureau made a more serious attempt to count homeless
people, both inside and outside the shelters. Two of the most prominent advocates—Mitch Snyder of CCNV and Maria Foscarinis of the
National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP)—went
on the record before the count with their own estimate of two to three
million and sharply criticized the Census Bureau’s strategy. The count
in fact came to only 228,621, and while some airplay was given to criticisms of the Census Bureau’s operation, the credibility of the advocacy
organizations with the mass media was significantly tarnished. Images
portraying the dignity and resilience of homeless people continued
to circulate in street newspapers, alternative newsweeklies, and art
houses, but these kinds of representations became increasingly rare in
television news and daily newspapers. The suicide that year of Snyder,
the most well known of the radical anti-homelessness activists, was
interpreted by many as some kind of verdict on the movement itself.
Editors gave more space to stories that conformed to the therapeutic and moral narratives, namely social welfare reports and policing
issues. Sentimental stories about homeless people became confined
to the annual Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays, the time when
Americans traditionally set aside individualism and self-interest for
expressions of community and compassion.64
In policy circles, the advocates’ position continued to lose much of
its early power, and discussions of homelessness increasingly focused
50
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
on the grubby, addicted, and depressed poor themselves. The National
Coalition for the Homeless, the NLCHP, and various city-level advocacy groups and organizations of the homeless continued to frame the
problem in largely systemic terms, but strategically they found themselves on the defensive, reduced to rearguard actions against welfare
cuts and the further criminalization of homelessness.
Far from inspiring a reassessment of American constructions of
poverty in general, as the system partisans had hoped, the homeless
gradually lost their mid-1980s image as the “deserving poor”65 and followed welfare mothers, the ghetto poor, and the rest of the so-called
underclass toward the land of the disreputable poor, their condition
constructed first and foremost as a problem of immoral or pathological behavior.
“Quality of Life”
While sick-talk and system-talk on homelessness have very different
narratives of the causes and cures of homelessness, they both imply
a basically sympathetic orientation to people who are homeless, an
assumption that they should be reintegrated into the broader society. From the late 1980s onward, the consensus on reintegration was
challenged by advocates of clearance who focused their rhetoric on
the noxious street-person, the revised version of the predatory tramp
of the 1870s. Sterner voices demanded reinstitutionalization of the
mentally ill and removal of the disreputable poor from public sight.
Across the country, both the tourist industry and middle-class civic
associations proclaimed compassion fatigue, lobbying for the police
and other city workers to clean up neighborhood shopping strips and
downtown streets and squares.
The primary object of sympathy was no longer the homeless themselves, but the decent citizen threatened by crime and unsightly disorder. Just as the New Dealers had repackaged the hobo as the migrant
worker, those calling for police crackdowns distanced themselves
from the homeless and adopted the term “street people,” an ill-defined
category suggesting a squabbling, hustling nuisance most likely to be
African American. This rhetorical twist shifted images of the homeless
much closer to the already discredited ghetto poor, directly counteracting the “whitening” strategy of the advocates.66
51
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
Central to revived sin-talk was what Gagnier and others have referred to as the aestheticization of homelessness, a shift in focus from
the problems of the homeless to the problems caused by homeless people—chiefly, the aesthetic or economic problems created by homeless
people panhandling or otherwise occupying public space, rendering it
ugly or disorderly.67
Local governments introduced new techniques of exclusion, from
alterations to the built environment to the proliferation of what came
to be known as quality-of-life legislation.68 Conflicts over public space
reached the greatest intensity in places where commerce was heavily
dependent on the fickle tourist trade. Orlando, home to Disney World,
was an early leader and took the strategy further than any other municipality. Having tried unsuccessfully to completely ban panhandling in
1980, the city introduced complex, heavily enforced codes. Panhandlers had to obtain laminated permits; they were forbidden to work
in stations, parks, stadiums, or near ATM machines; they were not to
approach people in vehicles, follow people, or work in pairs; they were
forbidden to make false representations such as claiming that a donation was required for a fictional need or wearing a military uniform; and
they could not ask for money for one purpose and spend it on another.
The extensive detail of Orlando’s quality-of-life legislation was
unusual, but eventually most other cities followed its lead. By the
mid-1990s, more than 75 percent of U.S. municipalities passed laws
prohibiting or restricting panhandling, and nearly 70 percent forbade
sleeping or loitering in public places.69
Contemporary sin-talk may have been relatively slow to cohere,
especially in the more liberal regions of the United States, but ten
years into the crisis it had made a forceful return. If we extend back
out to the broader reconfiguration of poverty discourse during the
same period, it is easy to see how the decline of system-talk was overdetermined by the weakness of the systemic construction of poverty
as a whole. Like the roundups of the tramp scare, the contemporary
manifestations of sin-talk were predicated on broader shifts in public
orientation toward poor people in general. Particularly significant was
the reconfiguration of three key institutional fields: welfare, policing,
and community action.
The great welfare reforms of the 1990s demonstrated the completion of a broad, twenty-year shift away from service provision and cash
52
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h ome le s s n e s s
transfers and back toward the punitive work programs and criminal
sanctions that had proliferated in the United States between 1865 and
the New Deal. By signing the momentous (Republican-sponsored)
1996 Family and Personal Responsibility Act, Democratic president
Bill Clinton demonstrated the Democratic Party’s relinquishment
of the policy of using cash transfers to mitigate the effects of social
inequality.
Clinton skillfully wove his acquiescence into a rhetoric of care
and inclusion, claiming that he was honoring a moral obligation to
help poor people help themselves. The new term limits, he said,
represented not punishment but liberation for welfare recipients
depressed and demoralized by their dependency. “The door has now
been opened to a new era of freedom and independence,” he intoned
in a radio address shortly after the bill was passed. “We can make
the permanent underclass a thing of the past.”70 Once liberated from
their alleged passivity, the poor were to be energized by their tussles
with the free market and thereby released from poverty, now defined
chiefly as a state of mind.
The Clintonian articulation of poverty as depression might suggest
that what was needed was not just work but therapeutic intervention.
Yet the short-term pseudo-therapeutic efforts of the cheerleaders
administering welfare reform were terminally hamstrung by inflexible
rules, punitive sanctions, and extremely limited resources for longterm support. In the big picture of American poverty management,
their efforts were vastly overshadowed by the far greater expenditure
of energy and resources on the criminal justice system. Poverty as
depression was trumped by the “moral poverty” delineated by William Bennett and other leaders of the war on drugs.
While media attention concentrated on federal-level legislation to
reform welfare for women and children, an equally important removal
of cash transfers was rolling forward on the local level. Between the
early 1980s and late 1990s every major American city either abolished
or reduced General Assistance payments to indigent single adults,
often deploying the argument that recipients used the money to buy
drugs.71 In many places, recipients could now claim benefits for only
one month out of any year.72 Where the time limits were less restrictive, job search and work requirements served a similar function. In
Los Angeles, for example, a third of the employable caseload were not
53
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
receiving their benefits in any given month due to penalties related to
job searches and work requirements.73
General Assistance benefits had always been locally funded and
administered, a piecemeal and perennially inadequate last resort for
those failing to qualify for federally mandated cash assistance. Nevertheless, something is always better than nothing. As Rossi has emphasized, even unequal relationships require some degree of reciprocity
to survive, and armies of failing family members and other couch
surfers who had given their hosts some money toward rent were no
longer able to do so.74 Altogether, the progressive loss of even these
meager payments pushed more and more of those living on the edge
into the homeless shelters.75
While welfare benefits and social service provision to poor people
were steadily scaled back, punitive measures against the deviant poor
moved to the center of new policing philosophy. This second broad
discursive transition was initiated by James Q. Wilson and George
Kelling in their article “Broken Windows: Police and Neighborhood
Safety,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1982. Considered by
many police chiefs as the most influential text in modern American
policing history, “Broken Windows” privileged a Main Street conception of the orderly community over the rights of individuals to behave
as they choose, claiming that the relatively permissive responses to
panhandling and loitering in the 1960s and 1970s had led to declining
levels of civility and safety in public space.
The debate continues over whether there is much validity to the
“broken windows” thesis.76 But whether or not Wilson and Kelling
were right that the prevention of panhandling could preempt more
serious crimes, their theories were put into practice all over the country, in the form of both legislation and the policing to back it up. Police
officers on the quality-of-life frontlines became full-time rousters of
the homeless in a constant war of maneuver, a full-time job.
The third, and related, discursive transition that made it possible to
crack down on homeless people was the transformation of the concept
of community within the big cities. In the 1960s and 1970s unions and
urban grassroots organizations developed a diverse, cross-class conception of community and neighborhood, which asserted the rights of
the poor, disabled, and otherwise marginalized to be included in local
decision-making.
54
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
managing h omele s s n e s s
With the turning of the political tide in the late 1970s, the progressive urban community organization began to lose its power. Slowly
these organizations were superceded by thousands of associations of
“homeowners” or “stakeholders” bent on bringing a “broken windows”
policy to bear on local teenage “loiterers” or homeless “druggies.”
In general, the poor were increasingly treated as external threats to
the social body rather than community members in need of help or
integration.
Understandings of homelessness within the public sphere shifted
with these broader currents. As the sense of emergency of the mid1980s gave way first to the managed homelessness of the late 1990s
and then to the chronic homelessness push of the 2000s, activists
found fewer and fewer media outlets for system-talk. For their part,
poor Americans had by no means given up on systemic interpretations, but these social justice interpretations now rarely found voice
beyond smaller African American and left-wing media.
Reinventing the Poorhouse
The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the resurrection or expansion of many forms of poverty management characteristic of the sindominated mid-nineteenth century. The chaotic, diseased nineteenthcentury poorhouse became the late twentieth-century homeless
shelter, and the work test of stone breaking or wood chopping became
the humiliation of street cleaning for General Assistance or food
stamps. The children of the indigent were farmed out to inadequately
supported foster homes, some not much better than the notorious
“baby farms” of the nineteenth century. Evangelical skid row missions
were even closer to their forebears, “pray to eat” remaining the timehonored rule of the day.
At the same time, mass street homelessness became the catalyst
for one of the largest charity mobilizations of the century, reviving
the Victorian gift relationship between rich and poor that had largely
disappeared in the postwar period. Just as Lowell’s Scientific Charity transformed more ad hoc charitable efforts into coordinated action
under bureaucratic surveillance, the volunteer-run shelters of the
mid-1980s were gradually professionalized and incorporated into a
network of microsurveillance, where clients are fingerprinted on entry
55
© Gowan, Teresa, Jan 01, 2010, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders : Homeless in San Francisco
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN: 9780816673544
m a na gi ng home le s s nes s
and compelled to construct their problems as bad behavior. Not surprisingly, Paul Boden is not the only anti-homelessness activist to have
openly admitted to some grave misgivings about the unintended consequences of the big-hearted homeless advocacy of the 1980s.77
Where the psychopathologists of the previous century had prescribed moral cures for mental disorders such as wanderlust, the new
homelessness experts locate the roots of dispossession in mental illness and inadequacy, demanding submission to medications, twelvestep doctrine, and housing-readiness programs. If the suspicious,
intrusive practices of the Charity Organization Societies gave life to
the dependent, mendacious paupers they feared, the authoritarian
medicalization of the modern homelessness industry exerts a similar pressure. Those who fail to follow this straight and narrow road
are subjected to tactics not so different from those of the great tramp
scare. Contemporary forms of outdoor relief for single adults (General
Relief or General Assistance) have been either abolished or decimated
in every major American city, and police mobilized in large numbers
to clear commercial strips and downtown areas.
Like the tramps a century before, legions of men, and not a few
women, vote with their feet, trying to hold onto a degree of autonomy
by roughing it outside, accepting only the most superficial relationship
with service agencies. It is to their world, more specifically, to the skid
row streets and the hidden camps of San Francisco, that I now turn.
56